Ovens have long been used for cooking. Several types of conventional ovens exist. One is a convection oven, which features a fan designed to circulate air within the oven cavity creating convection currents. The fan also circulates the air past a heating element that heats the air to cooking temperatures; typically several hundred degrees. The hot circulating air currents pass over and around food in the oven cavity to facilitate cooking. Convection oven cooking is considered by many to be superior to standard radiant oven cooking.
Conventional convection ovens suffer from a number of drawbacks. For example, some conventional ovens heat food by circulating air in one direction around stationary food. The unidirectional path or stream of the airflow can result in unevenly cooked food. More specifically, the portion of the food facing or directly in the path of the hot airflow generally will heat quicker than portions of the food shielded from or not directly in the path of the airflow. Some conventional convection ovens attempt to solve this disproportional quicker cooking of one portion of the food by providing a reversing fan, which is intended to reverse the direction of the airflow periodically. However, these reversing fan systems alone have not been controlled adequately and fail to circulate a sufficient amount of heated air evenly throughout all regions of the oven cavity. Consequently, hot spots and uneven cooking still occurs. Further, airflow generally is directed from the sides of the fan cowling, which can result in uneven distribution of hot air and regions of stagnation in the oven.
Many conventional convection ovens also fail to provide an adequate variety of cooking modes customized to various foods that may be cooked in the oven. Simple convection ovens, for example, usually have a single direction airflow path with a fan operated by a timer or by a watchful user and function to cook food for a set or predetermined period of time. Convection ovens with a reversing fan also operate in many instances for a set period of time, albeit with periodically reversing flow, until the food has cooked. This rather simple timed oven operation offers limited control and is not highly adaptable to the many types of food that may be cooked in the oven. As a result, the preparation of food in these ovens is largely relegated to trial and error, experience, and much supervision. Even more sophisticated convection ovens with some cooking mode selections have had insufficient variations of cooking modes and inadequate coordination of the various heating sources to provide highly precise and adaptable cooking.
Accordingly, a need exists for an oven that addresses successfully the foregoing and other problems and shortcomings of the prior art. It is to these provisions of such ovens that the present invention is primarily directed.